DESTROYING FAMILIES THAT WORK

No more of that fuddy-duddy nonsense about a father teaching his sons his trade

Talk with Jude Doty from Yakima, Washington for a few minutes and you know that he is a man passionate about teaching his children. He wants to teach them about work and about biblical values, both of which they won’t learn in the government school system. Did I mention that God has blessed him and his wife, Angela, with seven children? And they consider their children too valuable to turn over to a government teacher all day. In addition, Jude is an asset to his community in Washington, fulfilling the American dream of independent businessman: He made a living through Doty House Moving. He wanted to teach his children his trade by allowing them to work beside him. Thanks to the Washington Department of Labor and Industry (L&I), his teaching the value of work to his children has ended.

You can read a more detailed version of Jude and Angela’s story on his Web site, but the basic plot is that Jude and Angela want to teach their children to be responsible, independent thinkers and doers. You can already figure out that with this recipe, their children are going to have a hard time finding a job in the planned global economy, not a place for independent folks. The more immediate problem, according to the L&I, is that their desire to teach responsibility is not certified, and furthermore, they are not certified; the Dotys, wonderful as they may be, are not at all a part of the socialistic school-to-work agenda of the government schools. Washington has a real problem with this lack of certification, this lack of state approval for Doty as a teacher of his own children. As the government schools scream their “Parent as Teacher” programs to the gullible masses, parents do not qualify to teach their children. Doty’s Web site states:

“Our state law requires homeschoolers to teach occupational education, but if I have my son run after a hammer or help as a ‘spotter’ while moving a house down the road at 5-mph, with police, overhead linemen, flaggers and pilot cars diverting the traffic, and not in the presence of other children, but with his father supervising, they call that ‘employment’ and an ‘unreasonable risk,’ claiming homeschool vocational training is not “bona fide’.”

If you’ve read John Taylor Gatto’s The Underground History of American Education, you know that compulsory government schooling is all about dumbing down our citizens so that our children will fit easily into the giant planned economy puzzle. In case you still think that school exists to help your child succeed as an independent thinker, worker, and self-sufficient leader, take a look at these words from Gatto’s book, available free online: “[S]chool was engineered to serve a concealed command economy and a deliberately re-stratified social order. It wasn’t made for the benefit of kids and families as those individuals and institutions would define their own needs. School is the first impression children get of organized society; like most first impressions, it is the lasting one. Life according to school is dull and stupid, only consumption promises relief: Coke, Big Macs, fashion jeans, that’s where real meaning is found, that is the classroom’s lesson, however indirectly delivered.” .....

While the Dotys were trying to help their children to grow up with the thinking and working abilities of a George Washington or a Ben Franklin, both of whom were homeschooled, the Washington government had a different plan: “Governor Christine Gregoire, formerly as Attorney General, acknowledged that a parent could train a child in ‘work-place skills and experience’ like the schools, but unlike the schools and other nonprofit businesses such as Habitat for Humanities, her office claimed the parents cannot receive ‘an appreciable benefit from the student’s work,’ without it being ‘employment,’ and that running after a hammer was “an appreciable benefit.’ The [Attorney General’s] office will prosecute the parents if ‘the activities are more than just a learning experience or a parent teaching skills to a child, but a situation where the minor is contributing to the profit of the particular enterprise’.”

The Department of L&I defined crime in a strange and unusual way for the Doty family, stating that Jude failed to make his children full employees of his business, refusing to pay workers’ compensation and such for them. Never mind that Jude Doty took a stand and said that his children were his children, not his employees; when the department looked at the Doty family, they decided to change how they looked at family employment. Jude told me earlier this week that this new vision of the Department of L&I goes against previous decisions: “All the case and statutory law I have found defends the right of the parents to work with their children.”

If you own a business and think you’re immune from such treatment, think again. If your child brings in mail regarding that business from the mailbox to your office, you could be forced to stop that child from bringing in the mail or lose your child. If that sounds too strange to be true, take a look at the Doty family’s Web site; that scenario happened to a developer’s family in Yakima and the child had to stop bringing in mail and packages. There was an especially tragic ending to this developer’s family’s story—after being forced to stop work, his child began running with the wrong crowd and died. And if you think the Dotys’ case is some aberrance that would never happen to anyone else, Jude told me this week that he “recently heard of three other homeschooling pastors and contractors that got cited for working with their sons.” After realizing how easy it is for the government to punish families that work, it’s easy to agree with Jude that “the risk to youth that are denied work opportunities is far worse than any work.”

Throughout January of 2003, Doty was “watched around 30 hours a week by [Washington Department of Labor and Industry] inspectors.” One month later, he “received fines of $34,000 for ‘employing’ two of his children, then 11 and almost 14.” According to the state of Washington, this caring father subjected his children “to an ‘unreasonable risk,’ primarily working on [his] own property.” Things escalated from there, with Doty refusing to acquiesce to the bullying of the L&I and the L&I continuing to cite and fine him for allowing his children to work, including my personal favorite, one for $1,000 per day for “no parent/school authorization.” Say what?!? The Department of Labor and Industry deemed Jude Doty a “repeat offender” and “felon,” saying that his use of children as employees was unfair to other companies and promising to “level the playing field,” the department placed a lien on his properties and seized everything from his family van to his bank account. Mission accomplished: field leveled. But does anyone actually believe that these fines were about leveling the field?

And lest we forget, I must stress that this whole ordeal is in the best interest of the children. How else could you explain the wonderful appearance of one of my own personal favorite government agencies, Child Protective Services? Jude writes the following account on his site: “On January 31st, CPS agents, working with L & I, tried to abject my son, Zach, while he was with me in the L & I building. Next, L & I got a Court Order to keep my children off all work sites, off all equipment, and less than ten feet off the ground and it ‘directed . . . all persons in active concert . . . to remove’ my boys from any work site or equipment! Remember, I owned the work site! Can you imagine that a neighbor or police can now forcibly remove your children from your family business and private property because they worked with their dad?”

Much more here





Self-Education: Lost Crown Jewel of Learning

As I taught myself for the last two years of High School, back in the 1960s, I identify strongly with the article excerpted below. I ended up with a Ph.D. and a list of academic publications as long as your arm so we are not only talking about the distant past here:

Who is this youngster?

He started school at age seven and returned home in tears after three months. His teacher had called him “addled.” His mother took over, reading with him. A science book was a favorite. At twelve he persuaded his mother to let him apply for the post of newsboy on the Port Huron-to-Detroit train (which left at 7 a.m. and returned at 9:30 p.m. with a five-hour layover in Detroit for library time). He sold fruits and produce from Port Huron in Detroit and evening papers on his return trip. At age fifteen he bought a printing press and started a train-oriented newspaper. His total formal classroom instruction was three or four months. His productivity as an adult: 1000 patents.

The boy’s name.......Thomas Edison (from my notes on Edison: The Man Who Made The Future by Ronald W. Clark, 1977, pp. 9-15.) Imagine young Edison’s fate had he – and his mother – tried something like that under today’s benevolent regime of child-labor sanctions and compulsory schooling.

American children are over-programmed. They spend radically more hours sitting in classrooms during their young lives than did children just two or three generations earlier. Their bodies and minds were not made for this. To what degree they are over-programmed – and to what effect – is suggested by considering two extremes in scheduling the young.

The Japanese are tops in programming the young: 240-day school year, hours of daily homework, juku (cram schools) after regular school two or three times per week, high stakes tests for admission to middle and high schools, "Examination Hell" for university admission.

What sort of young person emerges? Vapid. Wondrously immature. Washed-out. So contends professor Jane Barnes Mack-Cozzo, twelve-year veteran of Japanese university teaching ("If You Think We Have Problems..." The American Enterprise, September, 2002). Once admitted to university, "virtually all learning and study cease." Many students do not even attend class. Those that do "exhibit behavior befitting youngsters half their age...." Their "childishness...endemic in the society as a whole (Douglas MacArthur called Japan a 'nation of 12-year-olds') is reinforced perhaps because the rest of these students' lives is so asphyxiatingly programmed."

At the other extreme: Abraham Lincoln recalled attending "some schools, so called" but for less than a year altogether. "Still, somehow I could read, write, and cipher to the Rule of Three; but that was all." In an 1860 autobiography, writing in the third person, Lincoln declared: "He was never in a college or Academy [high school] as a student and never inside of a college or academy building till since he had a law- licence."

In 1997 Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Lincoln biographer David Herbert Donald delivered an address to the Lincoln Fellowship of Pennsylvania, “Education Defective: Abraham Lincoln's Preparation for Greatness.” “Education Defective” is a remarkable 3,000-word account of what we know of Lincoln’s education. It deserves careful study. Selected excerpts:

We need to remind ourselves that in the 1820's and 1830's a school term usually ran only two or three months, especially in the Western states. Lincoln's ‘agregate’ of one year's total attendance, then, really meant five or six years of schooling, so that it is fair to say that he had the equivalent of a sixth-grade education--considerably above the national average at that time..... [This education] gave him a sufficient mastery of the basic tools of language. Dilworth's Spelling-Book...provided an introduction to grammar and spelling...the final sections included prose and verse selections....Other readers, like The Kentucky Preceptor, expanded and reinforced what he learned form Dilworth's.

These books encouraged young Lincoln's love for reading, and he read everything he could get his hands on. There were not many books on the Indiana frontier, and he pored over The Pilgrim's Progress and Aesop's Fables, until he virtually memorized them. Quotations from both showed up repeatedly in his presidential writings. He was fascinated by history, and learned lessons in patriotism from Parson Mason Weems's Life of George Washington.

From William Scott's Lessons in Elocution he gained basic rules for public speaking, and the selections in this book were probably his introduction to Shakespeare. He memorized from Scott's Elocution set pieces like King Claudius's soliloquy on his murder of Hamlet's father....

What kind of writer did this narrow, self-directed education produce? The Gettysburg Address

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

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